Nkem Ndefo is the founder of Lumos Transforms and creator of The Resilience Toolkit, a model that promotes embodied self-awareness and self-regulation in an ecologically sensitive framework and social justice context. She brings an abundance of experience as a clinician, educator, researcher, and community strategist to innovative programs that address trauma and inequity, build resilience, and shape liberatory change for individuals and organizations throughout the US and internationally. She is particularly interested in working alongside people most impacted by violence and marginalization.
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How does your organization do supervision or mentorship? Hard things come up all the time. Are you practicing sitting with people, noticing when people are having hard times?
Additional Quotes:
They have decision fatigue. It's like a sign of decreased resilience or small bandwidth. Like, I just can't make another decision because I'm weighing so many different possibilities, many of them unknown, and the more that are unknown, the more things are there in the air, and there's more contingencies that I have to, you know, hold, not just mentally, but like energetically and emotionally, all those contingencies, and it takes energy. And if we are resource constrained with our energy, our attention, our capacity we're not resilient to make decisions.
When you see a binary, trauma is afoot. Because trauma polarizes, and so you'll see these sort of extremes, it's hard to find that nuance in the middle that can see the complexity and sit with the complexity. And so when we see these sort of extremes of I have all the power, I have no power. Somebody has all of the control or no control.
Not everything works for everybody and it may work for you sometimes and not others. And so when you have that self awareness, you have all kinds of choice opens up and the ability to attune your responses. So you're not wasting energy. In these over responses gives you more capacity to make more decisions to sit with more uncertainty to juggle all those contingencies of decision making more easily.
Transitions are hard because for most people they're associated with grief and, I'm going to say the dominant, North American, Western European, cultures are absolute, in my very professional language, shit at dealing with grief. And so we don't have good models. We don't have good skills and we need them because transitions are a change.
I try not to ask, could this be worse? Because usually the answer is yes. And, I really would rather spend my energy imagining what would be possible if we got it right.
To connect with Nkem or learn more about her work:
To take the Workplace Transition Archetype Quiz
To learn more about Leaving Well
This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley
